Should this become a viable product, I imagine that RGB PPUs would be so expensive and hard to get that it'd sell quite well. Even if the price was high.

Not to mention that it does a much better job than an RGB PPU. I'd imagine that the finished product would be easier to install too.

I'm not sure what you mean, RGB PPUs already are very expensive and hard to get. I don't think the machines that had them were terribly common and people starting hacking up RGB mods so a bunch of them are gone now. It would be nice to see some kit that could generate better video with the standard PPU.

Should this become a viable product, I imagine that RGB PPUs would be so expensive and hard to get that it'd sell quite well. Even if the price was high.

Not to mention that it does a much better job than an RGB PPU. I'd imagine that the finished product would be easier to install too.

I'm not sure what you mean, RGB PPUs already are very expensive and hard to get. I don't think the machines that had them were terribly common and people starting hacking up RGB mods so a bunch of them are gone now. It would be nice to see some kit that could generate better video with the standard PPU.

I meant that it would sell because RGB PPUs are getting harder and harder to find and it would provide a much better and hopefully cheaper solution for everyone who's been hunting for one.

I like how this is basically the only project I've ever seen that attempts to achieve RGB output using a palette close to the composite palette without using full-system emulation (as opposed to the RGB PPU palette). I enjoy switching Nestopia back and forth between RGB and composite palettes, and between a soft non-artifacted output (resolution all the way up but sharpness all the way down) and the default composite artifacting. Sometimes I even do RGB palette with composite artifacts just for shiggles

I think this is a pretty amazing discovery. I have an RGB modded Famicom and I have been brainstorming ideas for ways to get around the limitations of the RGB PPU when it comes to game compatibility due to emphasis, or even just the palette differences with some games. If you can get this to a point where you can provide manufactured boards that output RGB this would truly be the perfect solution! I will be following this thread hoping that day comes. Most of this is beyond my abilities or understanding, so I apologize if this is a stupid question, but do you get any sort of lag when output to vga? Again I think this is really great work and hope it develops into something more.

S-video I'll totally buy that! I've been tweaking the s-video from my rgb modded famicom / nes consoles. I even went through the trouble of building a circuit to divide the master clock down to a speed to drive the sony cxa2075 encoder to help get rid of colour bleeding. Is it difficult to add other possible video output formats at the same time? Like component, vga, hdmi, s-video, and rgb all at once?

incrediblehark wrote:

I think this is a pretty amazing discovery. I have an RGB modded Famicom and I have been brainstorming ideas for ways to get around the limitations of the RGB PPU when it comes to game compatibility due to emphasis, or even just the palette differences with some games. If you can get this to a point where you can provide manufactured boards that output RGB this would truly be the perfect solution! I will be following this thread hoping that day comes. Most of this is beyond my abilities or understanding, so I apologize if this is a stupid question, but do you get any sort of lag when output to vga? Again I think this is really great work and hope it develops into something more.

I romhacked the pallette in super mario adventure to stop using colours that the rgb chip didn't display. It wasn't fun but it's one way to fix that.

Any change you might give a hint of where you're getting the background/sprite bit from?

I'd rather try to turn this into a standalone prototype before to avoid somebody else running with the idea. But I'm sure the information will come out eventually.

incrediblehark wrote:

Most of this is beyond my abilities or understanding, so I apologize if this is a stupid question, but do you get any sort of lag when output to vga?

There's no lag (except for one scanline worth of lag because of scan doubling, but that's not noticeable in any way).

Drakon wrote:

S-video I'll totally buy that! I've been tweaking the s-video from my rgb modded famicom / nes consoles. I even went through the trouble of building a circuit to divide the master clock down to a speed to drive the sony cxa2075 encoder to help get rid of colour bleeding. Is it difficult to add other possible video output formats at the same time? Like component, vga, hdmi, s-video, and rgb all at once?

Outputting all formats simultaneously would require a DAC for each format so it's not really worth it. But a switch of some kind could be implemented that could be used to switch between different output formats.

...

In any case, like I said previously, it's going to take a while until I can turn this into a commercial product, because I have zero experience with custom PCBs, and I'm not too thrilled about investing a bunch of money into prototyping because of that.

So what you're saying is there's a way to switch between possible video output formats? That would be excellent. I think people would love to have some way of being able to change the type of video format that it's outputting. You don't need everything at once but atleast having the ability to change between s-video / rgb / component / hdmi would be excellent. I don't mind waiting for this to get done.

I romhacked the pallette in super mario adventure to stop using colours that the rgb chip didn't display. It wasn't fun but it's one way to fix that.

That was one of the ideas I was working on, and would need to be done on a per game basis obviously, but a lot more reasonable solution than a completely new PPU. Either way thefox's method is a much better solution than any of that because you get the best of both worlds with a correct palette for all games and the cleaner picture quality.

thefox, I know you said it will take some time to get experienced with the pcb and manufaturing side of things, and I also have no problem waiting. Whenever the ball does get rolling and you're looking for help fundraising I would be happy to contribute what I can.

I romhacked the pallette in super mario adventure to stop using colours that the rgb chip didn't display. It wasn't fun but it's one way to fix that.

That was one of the ideas I was working on, and would need to be done on a per game basis obviously, but a lot more reasonable solution than a completely new PPU. Either way thefox's method is a much better solution than any of that because you get the best of both worlds with a correct palette for all games and the cleaner picture quality.

thefox, I know you said it will take some time to get experienced with the pcb and manufaturing side of things, and I also have no problem waiting. Whenever the ball does get rolling and you're looking for help fundraising I would be happy to contribute what I can.

I actually prefer the rgb pallette, colours are brighter and more vibrant. I'm sure I'll buy thefox's fpga ppu thing when it's ready though, just because it rocks.

From what I've been reading, this uses Nintendulator's palette settings, right? Well, a couple years back, I worked on a custom NES palette that came as close as I could possibly get it to looking like the original NTSC NES colors in games. I used both a Sony Trinitron CRT and a Sony LCD to cross reference my entire collection of over 100 NES games (including all 6 Mega Man games and every stage in each) with my front-loader's composite out jack. The result is the only palette in my opinion that actually looks like the output from my real hardware. Now of course this is still subjective even with my best efforts to make it as accurate as possible, but I've yet to find a better palette.

Every now and then I get a request for the link, so if interested, here's the link to the palette file and the bitmap samples image:

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